I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I tried to put diesel in a petrol hire car at a service station just outside Angers. There I stood, nozzle in hand, wondering why it would not fit, while a Frenchman in the next bay watched with the kind of patient amusement usually reserved for toddlers attempting shoelaces. Merci, monsieur, for pointing at the green sticker. Merci also for not laughing out loud until I had walked away.

Three hours earlier I had left Nantes airport full of optimism and a badly folded map. The drive to the Parennes in Pays de la Loire should have been straightforward. It was not. My sat-nav developed what I can only describe as an existential crisis somewhere near Bauge-en-Anjou, sending me down lanes so narrow that I folded in the wing mirrors and held my breath. When I finally crunched up the gravel drive, I was two hours late, slightly traumatised, and absolutely starving.

The Parennes itself was one of those proper French country houses that makes you forget your troubles the moment you see it. Thick stone walls, wooden shutters, a garden that smelled of warm herbs and something else I later identified as the neighbour's goat. I dumped my bags and headed straight for the kitchen, because priorities.

The owners had left a welcome basket that I attacked with the dignity of a man who had not eaten since a soggy airport sandwich. Local goat's cheese, a jar of rillettes, some apples from their own tree. I sat on the terrace with cheese on a bread roll and felt genuinely emotional. The rillettes I saved for later, telling myself I would be civilised about it. I was not. It was gone by ten o'clock that evening, eaten straight from the jar with a teaspoon while standing in front of the open fridge like a raccoon in a bin.

The next morning I attempted to cook breakfast properly. The kitchen had a proper range and everything, so I thought I would do the full Anglo-French fusion: eggs, local bacon from the market in Bauge, mushrooms, and perhaps a croissant for local colour. What I produced was technically edible but spiritually wrong. The mushrooms released a lake of water, the eggs went rubbery, and I discovered that French bacon is not really bacon in the British sense. It is ham having an identity crisis. I ate it anyway, standing at the kitchen counter, and made a mental note to find a proper pub lunch.

The local bar-tabac in the village became my salvation. Not technically a pub, I know, but it had beer, it had locals playing cards at midday, and it had a chalkboard menu that changed depending on what the owner's wife felt like cooking. I had a plat du jour of rabbit in mustard sauce that made my failed breakfast feel like a distant memory. The owner spoke no English. I speak schoolboy French at best. We communicated through pointing, smiling, and me accidentally ordering two desserts because I misunderstood the word "supplement." Best mistake I ever made.

The market in Bauge-en-Anjou on Saturday morning was where I really came alive, or rather where my wallet came out and my good intentions went to die. Fresh trout from the Loir, vegetables with actual soil still on them, bread that sang when you tapped it. I bought a chicken, some of those tiny new potatoes, and herbs I could not identify but liked the smell of. That evening I attempted a roast, using the proper oven this time, not the panicky hob. It worked. I am not saying it was Michelin standard, but I ate it on the terrace with a bottle of Cabernet d'Anjou and felt briefly like a competent adult.

The village did not have a British-style pub, but it had something better: a tiny restaurant in someone's front room that opened two nights a week. You had to book by leaving a note in their letterbox. I did this with terrible handwriting and some guesswork about French formalities. They fed me a four-course meal for twenty-five euros, including wine, and I understood perhaps forty percent of what the host said to me. It did not matter. We raised glasses. The food spoke fluent delicious.

By the end of the week I had a routine. Morning coffee on the terrace, planning what I would buy or cook. A walk to work up an appetite. Lunch somewhere simple, or a picnic of market cheese and bread by the river. Then the serious business of dinner, either out or back at the Parennes, where I slowly learned not to ruin perfectly good ingredients through overenthusiasm.

On my final evening I cooked again, a simple omelette with the last of the market herbs and some of that goat's cheese. It was not sophisticated. But I ate it with proper cutlery, at the table, with a glass of wine, and I thought about how I had arrived flustered and hungry and slightly petrol-pump-defeated. The Parennes had fed me back to myself, one meal at a time. I even folded the map properly for the return journey. Some lessons stick, even if I still double-check the fuel cap.